{"id":582700,"date":"2026-04-03T10:41:07","date_gmt":"2026-04-03T10:41:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/582700\/"},"modified":"2026-04-03T10:41:07","modified_gmt":"2026-04-03T10:41:07","slug":"its-colin-josts-turn-to-try-the-comedian-to-drama-series-drug-lord-pivot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/582700\/","title":{"rendered":"It’s Colin Jost’s turn to try the “comedian to drama series drug lord” pivot"},"content":{"rendered":"

Bryan Cranston didn\u2019t invent the idea of a well-known comic actor gaining massive critical acclaim by making a sudden pivot to crime-filled drama, but he certainly helped solidify the template; it is, for instance, pretty hard not to think at least a bit about Walter White when Variety\u00a0reports today<\/a> that one of Saturday Night Live\u2018s resident\u00a0Weekend Update\u00a0guys, Colin Jost, has reportedly just scored a new gig starring in a true crime story about a mild-mannered dentist who secretly built a drug empire for himself.<\/p>\n

Specifically, Jost has been attached to star in a new Peacock series about Larry Lavin, a suburban dentist who had a sideline running a hefty cocaine distribution empire on the East Coast in the 1970s and 1980s. (Sometimes dubbed \u201cThe Yuppie Conspiracy.\u201d) The show itself doesn\u2019t have a title yet, but Variety\u00a0notes that it\u2019s based on the first season of the Audacy podcast\u00a0Wolves Among Us, which details Lavin\u2019s rise, rinse, spit, and fall.\u00a0<\/p>\n

We\u2019ll be honest: While we can kind of see why Jost might feel like a good fit for this\u2014at the risk of being mean, he doesn\u2019t not\u00a0look like \u201ca dentist who also deals cocaine\u201d\u2014but he also seems like an unlikely candidate for a pivot to serious acting. His resum\u00e9 is notably light on any such roles; heck, he hardly even pops up in sketches on SNL, largely content to just play himself while lobbing jokes from the Update\u00a0desk. But Jost was apparently interested enough in this project to not only star in it, but executive produce, through his No Notes Productions company. Meanwhile, his showrunner on the project, Alex Barnow, appears to be attempting a bit of a \u201ccomedy guy to serious drama\u201d pivot of his own: Although he co-wrote the screenplay for 2019\u2019s Samuel L. Jackson Shaft<\/a>\u00a0movie, he\u2019s also primarily a comedy guy, having spent the last several years as the showrunner for\u00a0The Goldbergs\u00a0at ABC. It is, in other words, a pretty weird set of guys to be making a TV show about a real-life drug kingpin\u2014even if he was also a dentist and a suburban dad.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Bryan Cranston didn\u2019t invent the idea of a well-known comic actor gaining massive critical acclaim by making a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":582701,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[64,63,447,134],"class_list":["post-582700","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/582700","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=582700"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/582700\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/582701"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=582700"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=582700"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=582700"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}